Adam Hochschild Reveals His Secret to Good Writing

by James Green

James Green’s new
book on the West Virginia coal mine wars will be published by Grove
Press early next year.

On
the first weekend in April I attended a Conference called “The
Power of Narrative,” sponsored by Boston University’s College of
Communication. The gathering attracted an audience of 400 people,
almost entirely members of the working press. The conference is
designed mainly for journalists who are working in “long form
narrative,” that is, for reporters writing newspaper feature
stories, magazine articles, and books based on historical events.
Past presenters have included star journalists who delve into
history, like the former New York Times reporter Isabel
Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns. But in the
past, a few accomplished historians have participated as well,
notably Adam Hochschild, who has regularly revealed –with
remarkable generosity and clarity – the techniques he used in
writing his highly-acclaimed books, King Leopold’s Ghost,
Bury the Chains, and To End All Wars.

This
year, Adam returned to make keynote remarks on storytelling with Dan
Barry of the New York Times, to contribute to a plenary
session on writing memoir, and to offer an intriguing workshop listed
as, “Biography of a Book in Progress: How do you sound original
where there are 15,000 books on your subject?” In this session,
Hochschild reported on his strategy for writing another book about
the Americans who participated in the Spanish Civil War: it will be
based on the three major keys that made his earlier history books
such enormous successes.

First,
Hochschild refuses to be put off by the fact that a great subject has
been “done” before, even by legions of other historians. Why, he
asked, should an academic historian only choose a topic so
specialized or so esoteric that no one has examined it before? Why
not follow the advice of Melville who wrote: “To produce a mighty
book, you must choose a mighty theme”? Of course, the answer is
that scholars feel the need to conduct original research and make a
novel “argument.” But this form of scholarship may no longer be
the only way to publish, even in prestigious university presses. As
an editor for one of these publishers told me recently: “We can’t
publish a lot of Ph.D. theses produced by students in the best
history departments because the topics are too obscure and the
writing is too dense. We are looking for manuscripts of interest to
the general reader.”

Second,
Hochschild personalizes his narratives. For the new book on the
American volunteers in Spain he has spent months finding characters
whose experiences, memories, and letters can provide the keys to his
kind of storytelling. Some of these men and women interacted with
one another during the Civil War in the sort of surprising ways we
saw the characters mesh and clash in his profound story of Great
Britain’s agony during the Great War. Though none of them were as
prominent as writers like Hemingway, some of these new characters are
valuable because they open aspects of life in Republican Spain often
ignored by journalists at the time and by latter day historians:
notably the remarkable social reconstruction of Catalonia by the
Anarchists.

Over
breakfast, I asked Adam if a character-driven approach to history has
been the key element in his narratives, and he said, yes, “so far,”
but that this was by no means the only effective method of
storytelling.

Third, Hochschild
believes in the importance of “scene setting,” speaking of this
as though he was a set designer in the theater. In one session, the
author described how he used steam boat schedules to recreate a scene
for King Leopold’s Ghost when Joseph Conrad’s steamer
passed by the boat on Congo River carrying George Washington
Williams, the black American journalist who wrote the first major
exposé of the atrocities in King Leopold’s Congo. In another
session Adam offered a sneak preview of the opening to his
forthcoming book, the recreation of moment which sets up the big
question he will confront: why did a bunch of Americans risk their
lives by going to fight in Spain? Of course, none of this staging can
be imagined even though in Hochschild’s hands scenes do read as
though written for a novel.

Since nearly all of
the presenters at the BU conference were reporters, I asked
Hochschild what historians have to learn from journalists. He
replied saying that he didn't like to draw disciplinary boundaries
that divide those who care about history and are devoted to telling
stories from the past, no matter how they were trained.

I found listening to journalists talk candidly about the craft of
writing and storytelling a refreshing change from the discourse in
academic conferences.

This year,
tough-talking Jacqui Banaszynski told us about writing her ground
breaking 1998 feature story “AIDS in the Heartland” and urged us
not be “afraid to care” if he want to show our readers how and
why they should care. And David Finkel, a staff writer for the
Washington Post, shared the agony he experienced in deciding
what to include in the gruesome story of an American soldier’s
death in Iraq, one of many gut-wrenching episodes in his book The
Good Soldiers (2009).

Paul Kramer of Vanderbilt, the only academically trained historian on
this year’s BU program, passed along some of that he learned from
journalists in a session on how to balance “narrative verve” with
“scholarly rigor” in writing non-fiction. “Research scholars
have much to say to the public,” Kramer remarked, “but
professional protocols often discourage them from saying it in a
public language, a task taken up by journalists.” Kramer told me he
would like to hear from historians who might want to attend a “boot
camp” for academics who are interested in writing narratives that
will engage the public. If this kind of history writers’ workshop
comes to pass, I hope some journalists will be invited.